


offer the bomb to the wolves

by postcardmystery



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Burns, Child Death, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mind Control, Murder, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:19:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They called you a monster, but only because they didn’t know any better. They called you a monster, but that’s all right. They’ll learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	offer the bomb to the wolves

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for murder (including the murder of children), graphic descriptions of burn wounds, violence of all kinds, severe mental health issues, canonical character death, and Peter's mind-control of Lydia.
> 
> Thank you to gyzym, who loves me even when I write things as dark as this.

You take children and you make them into soldiers. You look in the mirror and a monster looks back. You get your claws into everything you can reach but no claws can ever get the fire out. Once, you burnt, but that’s a lie. Your claws don’t retract. You were always a monster. You’re still on fire, and if you burn, so must everything those claws get near.

They called you a monster, but only because they didn’t know any better. They called you a monster, but that’s all right. They’ll learn.

 

 

The house is on fire. The crunch of floorboards, black beneath your feet, and your hair comes off in handfuls when you try to rip it out. In spring, the kitchen always smelled like violets. You watched your mate scream until their tongue turned into meat and your thighs are still marked from your youngest niece’s claws. In summer, the garden smelt of roses. Maybe you’re screaming, or maybe that’s just inside your head. You shut your eyes and you still hear them. The water burns more than the fire, and you know what you’re doing, you know what you’re doing, and you breathe in and nothing smells like violets. It’s been six years. It’s been six minutes. You open your mouth, and you don’t scream. You try. You try. You can’t remember how. Once, you called this aching hole in your chest, the torn strips your flesh hangs in every time you take another breath that you don’t want to have to make, _family_. You feel every cell heal, your blood slow as sludge and your mind faster than light-speed, and there’s something on your lips every time you breathe, but it has no name. The house is on fire, and you’re burning, because it’s the only thing you remember how to do at all.

 

 

Werewolves are born, not made. This is a lie, except for all the ways it isn’t. A genetic lottery you didn’t ask to win, a beta’s claws beneath your skin and it’s the house that made you, as much as anything ever did. A wolf’s fur can stay singed for a long, long time, but the full moon comes and goes, comes and goes. Werewolves are born, not made. This is an axiom nobody ever repeated. This is a lie nobody ever believed. You aren’t strong enough and you aren’t strong enough and Laura Hale comes to you and you smell power on her skin, as strong as the violets of her hair. She wasn’t born this way, but none of you were, and you can’t smile when she touches your hand. She smiles at you, and you can’t smile back. Werewolves are born, not made, but that’s a lie. Every alpha pays a blood-debt. You shut your eyes, your lids thin as paper and never quite blocking the light, and you hear the crackle of gasoline on naked flame, know you’ve paid your debt already, seven times in kind. Werewolves are born, not made, so what’s an alpha? Your fangs nudge against your tongue and the blood wells up and drips right out of your mouth. You’re a beta. Everyone wants power. Just a little push.

 

 

You know the smell of power, and it comes off the Martin girl in waves that leave you dizzy. She’s crowned herself the queen, fingers stuck with the thorns from her crown and she’s held on, held on, kept that picture-perfect smile and taken the stage until her feet are bruised and bleeding. In your arms she shakes like something it would be impolite to name rips through her, and your press your fingers into her thighs, grin at that Stiles kid until your jaw aches. Always have a plan b. Always have a plan b. The grass of the lacrosse field is damp beneath your knees and the scent of silver’s in your nostrils. That Stiles kid’s so scared you think he might piss himself and you can’t help the laughter that rips through you at the thought. It’s a wolf’s loss of control, but. You wear the grin and you wear the grin and you’re a dead man walking and it doesn’t matter because you can die a thousand times, you know the secret. It only hurts the once.

 

 

You’d speak to Derek, if your tongue could move. He was a child when you began to burn, and if he’s not quite a man four years later, neither of you will ever _be_  men, will you? He comes and he sits with you and he says nothing but his eyes do all the talking, like they have since he was four years old. Your claws slide out sometimes, unbidden, and they do it now, leave long grooves in the arm of their chair. Derek gasps and you wish you could speak. You wish for so many things, but your eyes can’t do the talking and all that’s left in you is wolf. _I love you_ , you do not say. _They will pay_ , you do not say, either.

 

 

You bite McCall because he’s there. The chaos of it thrills you. Once, chaos tore your skin off in strips, and now you’ve taken it and bottled it and let it loose every time you snap your jaws. You said that they all would pay, you’ve said it a thousand times. But they were all inside your head, and you know the truth. You don’t just mean the murderers. You’re chaos in a sharp, sharp suit, a werewolf born, not made. You’re an alpha, your skin thrumming with something humans cannot even conceive of and you’re a blood-thing, made of fury and vengeance and that crack in your chest where love used to be. They’re all going to pay. You’re a chaos-thing. The universe fucked you until you were screaming, so. Payback time. You were born a wolf. Here’s the thing: the humans weren’t.

 

 

You’ve got splinters beneath your claws, because your claws are all that’s left. The grave dirt you lie in is cold on burned flesh that is charred but does not hurt. There are strands of red between your fingers and death is just a little push. Most things, you’ve learnt, are. Hunters move above you and you know their tread well. Predators, you see, know their own. The Martin girl itches behind your eyelids and death is so much more than just a little push. You’re worm meat and you feel so cold and this is it, this is exactly what you were waiting for. You crossed the line and you crossed the line until you found one drawn in cement, not sand. You’re dead, but you know it. You lie in the dirt with eyes that won’t close, eyelids burnt off but you’re predator, not prey, and you know the truth. There’s no coming back from this. That’s the _point_.

 

****

Once, you ran with pack. You weren’t an alpha born, but that’s the thing: most wolves aren’t. Alphas are made, not born, but you knew that, you always knew that, and you never wanted to change it. You were your sister’s second, mud in her long dark hair and the scent of violets on her skin, and you stood at her shoulder, bared your teeth and flashed the blue eyes of the were-born, did not back down until she pulled back her lips, howled her orders. Your sister inherited her (your) mother’s eyes, blood-borne power dragging down through her veins, through centuries of a matrilineal crown. They’d wondered, with you the older and the more cunning, if it’d choose you this time, as, once or twice, the blood had. But it chose your sister and you did not resent it. The blood always knew. You ran with pack and snarled your sister’s orders and when she called you her _general_  it was only a little in play. You ran with pack and kept your claws sheathed and if your sister needed a knight in shining armour, she never said so, not once.

 

****

“Why are you doing this to me,” says the Martin girl, and she doesn’t want an answer. Somewhere deep inside of herself, she already knows.

“Because I know a leader when I see one,” you say, and stroke her cheek, and pretend, a weakness that only lasts a second, that she smells of violets.

 

****

You rise from the grave because you can do nothing else. Blood of your blood drips onto claws that you no longer keep sheathed and you crawl out of the earth with a smile on your face. You weren’t born what you are but you’ve had more than one birthing, in your time. Your skin is clean as a newborn's, beneath streaked grave-dirt, and when you close your eyes, you’re still dead. Derek howls and you’re supposed to be scared of that, of him, but you aren’t. You’ve known him since before he could walk and you know fear when you smell it. You grin at him, wear the wolf on your face, and you grin and you grin and you’re still dead. Vengeance wasn’t sweet and your skin is cold and this town, it hasn’t paid its blood-debt, not by a long, long way.

****

****

You were the second because you made the hard decisions, the bad decisions, the choices nobody else wanted to have to make. You made it out the fire because you were never in the house, because you came back from killing an omega on land most definitely not his own, and it was already too late. You pulled off the door with your bare hands and you let the fire take you but it was too late for you, just a different sort of too late. For the second time that night you had blood on your hands, and you felt your sanity crumble beneath you like the charred wood of your bedroom floor, did not try and get your claws into it as it cracked away like melting glass. You’re the pack’s second, you make the decisions nobody else wants to have to make. You let it go and you were glad of it. You stared down at hands with the flesh burnt clean off them, and all you had left were claws. You let the cold water sluice over wounds you knew that you would never be able to heal, and knew that you would never be sane again. You shut your eyes, and thanked a God you’d never believed in for such a benediction. You never wanted to make this decision. But, but, but, that eternal fucking but, you _did_.

 

****

“You killed Laura,” says Derek, his voice tight with horror he doesn’t want to be showing you, as you pick grave-dirt out from beneath your fingernails, the Martin girl out cold on the floor.

“You killed me,” you say, and shrug, because that’s precisely how much you care.

 

 

You were the pack’s second, your sister’s best soldier, the monster under the bed and the one no little wolf ever wanted to grow up to be. You met filthy, hungry omegas in the woods with a baseball bat and a very bad attitude. You made garottes laced with wolfsbane and twisted them between your fingers, heedless of the burn, and waited for the Alpha not your own to turn tail and run. You loved your family, but pack isn’t family. You felt them burn because you _felt them burn_ , the spark of magic in your chest that makes your eyes shine blue a curse stronger and more heady than the moon. You learnt that long ago, a child at your mother’s knee, that the magic does not wax and wane. It sparked in Laura, in Derek, in you, but because your sister never marked them the pack does not burn in them. You hack Laura in half and you feel the pain shatter over your skin like broken glass. You sit on the staircase of a house falling down, Derek baring his teeth at you and that Isaac kid hanging back, wary, and you press your fingers into the only scar a born wolf will ever have, the five thick lines of her claws, and smell your sister’s smile.

 

****

It’s been six years. It’s been six minutes. When you pulled Laura’s throat out the scar on your wrist ran red. You’re a dead thing, and now when you close your eyes you see things that you shouldn’t be able to see. You’re made of fangs and claws and cunning, and what’s the most surprising is how little things have changed. You’re still a soldier. You’re still a second. You’re still a dead man walking. Your eyes flash blue and you slip a knife into your boot, because your mouth is full of weapons but if you show the humans that you’ve played your hand too soon. There’s a snarl beneath your skin and you’re a soldier in a war that never ends. You’re a dead wolf walking, and this is how it always starts.

 

****

“What are you,” says Derek Hale, beneath a harvest moon, at seven, at sixteen, since forever, and you do not show him your scar, never answer.

 


End file.
